What's "queer"? Here's one
train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season--isn't
it?--is that it's the time when all the institutions are speaking with
one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the
same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language
of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long
school hiatus, special postage stamps and all. And the language of commerce
more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly
around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over
Americans' "holiday mood." The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind
the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the
cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas
question--Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash
flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families'
Christmas? And meanwhile the pairing "families/Christmas" becomes
increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves
according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the
holiday itself constituted in the image of "the" family.

The thing hasn't, finally,
so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas
itself. They all--religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the
discourses of power and legitimacy--line up with each other so neatly once
a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with
unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways
in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other?
What if the richest junctures weren't the ones where everything means
the same thing? Think of that entity "the family," an impacted social
space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with
each other:

a surname

a sexual dyad

a legal unit based on state-regulated
marriage

a circuit of blood relationships

a system of companionship
and succor

a building

a proscenium between "private"
and "public"

an economic unit of earning
and taxation

the prime site of economic
consumption

the prime site of cultural
consumption

a mechanism to produce, care
for, and acculturate children

a mechanism for accumulating
material goods over several generations

a daily routine

a unit in a community of
worship

a site of patriotic formation

and of course the list could
go on. Looking at my own life, I see that--probably like most people--I
have valued and pursued these various elements of family identity to quite
differing degrees (e.g. no use at all for worship, much need of companionship).
But what's been consistent in this particular life is an interest in not
letting very many of these dimensions line up directly with each other
at one time. I see it's been a ruling intuition for me that the most productive
strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to
disarticulate them one from another, to disengage them--the
bonds of blood, of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and
succor--from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called "family."

Or think of all the elements
that are condensed in the notion of sexual identity, something that the
commonsense of our time presents as a unitary category. Yet, exerting any
pressure at all on "sexual identity," you see that its elements include

your biological (e.g. chromosomal)
sex, male or female;

your self-perceived gender
assignment, male or female (supposed to be the same as your biological
sex);

the preponderance of your
traits of personality and appearance, masculine or feminine (supposed to
correspond to your sex and gender);

the biological sex of your
preferred partner;

the gender assignment of
your preferred partner (supposed to be the same as her/his biological sex);

the masculinity or femininity
of your preferred partner (supposed to be the opposite(1)
of your own);

your self-perception as gay
or straight (supposed to correspond to whether your preferred partner is
your sex or the opposite);

your preferred partner's
self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to be the same as yours);

your procreative choice (supposed
to be yes if straight, no if gay);

your preferred sexual act(s)
(supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you
are female or feminine);

your most eroticized sexual
organs (supposed to correspond to the procreative capabilities of your
sex, and to your insertive/receptive assignment);

your sexual fantasies (supposed
to be highly congruent with your sexual practice, but stronger in intensity);

your enjoyment of power in
sexual relations (supposed to be low if you are female or feminine, high
if male or masculine);

the people from whom you
learn about your own gender and sex (supposed to correspond to yourself
in both respects);

your community of cultural
and political identification (supposed to correspond to your own identity);

and--again--many more. Even
this list is remarkable for the silent presumptions it has to make about
a given person's sexuality, presumptions that are true only to varying
degrees, and for many people not true at all: that everyone "has a sexuality,"
for instance, and that it is implicated with each person's sense of overall
identity in similar ways; that each person's most characteristic erotic
expression will be oriented toward another person and not autoerotic; that
if it is alloerotic, it will be oriented toward a single partner or kind
of partner at a time; that its orientation will not change over time.(2)
Normatively, as the parenthetical prescriptions in the list above suggest,
it should be possible to deduce anybody's entire set of specs from the
initial datum of biological sex alone--if one adds only the normative assumption
that "biological sex of preferred partner" will be the opposite of one's
own. With or without that heterosexist assumption, though, what's striking
is the number and difference of the dimensions that "sexual identity"
is supposed to organize into a seamless and univocal whole.

And if it doesn't?

That's one of the things
that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent
elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't
be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental linguistic, epistemological,
representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us
who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among many other possibilities)
pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags, clones, leatherfolk,
ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers,
divas, Snap! queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties,
wannabes, lesbian-identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or . .
. people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.

Again, "queer" can mean something
different: a lot of the way I have used it so far in this dossier is to
denote, almost simply, same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay, whether
or not it is organized around multiple criss-crossings of definitional
lines. And given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions
against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow
those meanings, or to displace them from the term's definitional center,
would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.

Granted this, however, a
lot of the most exciting recent work around 'queer' spins the term outward
along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all:
the ways that race, ethnicity, post-colonial nationality criss-cross with
these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses,
for example. Intellectuals and artists of color whose sexual self-definition
includes 'queer'--I think of an Isaac Julien, a Gloria Anzaldua, a Richard
Fung--are using the leverage of "queer" to do a new kind of justice to
the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state. Thereby, the
gravity (I mean the gravitas, the meaning, but also the center
of gravity) of the term "queer" itself deepens and shifts, as well.

Another telling representational
effect. A word so fraught as "queer" is--fraught with so many social and
personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement--never
can only denote; nor even can it only connote; a part of its experimental
force as a speech act is the way it dramatizes locutionary position itself.
Anyone's use of "queer" about themselves means differently from their use
of it about someone else. This is true (as it might also be true of "lesbian"
or "gay") because of the violently different connotative evaluations that
seem to cluster around the category. But "gay" and "lesbian" still present
themselves (however delusively) as objective, empirical categories governed
by empirical rules of evidence (however contested). "Queer" seems to hings
much more radically and explicitly on a person's undertaking particular,
performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis
worth making explicit: that there are important senses in which "queer"
can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible
corollary: that what it takes--all it takes--to make the description "queer"
a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person.